I’ve scoured the internet looking for helpful (and easy) map making tutorials.
Check out these 3 great sites:

Check out Spoon Graphic‘s fantastic tutorial on making road maps with Adobe Illustrator. They make it look so easy! Their trick is creating individual brushes for each type of road. This is a real time saver.

Designer Freelance‘s tutorial takes a more manual approach. Their map design includes a hint of terrain, so it’s a bit less abstract/stylized and a tad more labor intensive. They rely heavily on the use of layers in Adobe Illustrator.

While the maps we are making in class are grounded in reality, we can still learn from the world of fantasy map making. Over at Virtual Verduria, they are using Adobe Photoshop to create maps. Their demo for making topographical mountains is particularly helpful, and the image that shows the five Photoshop layers as separate components clearly demonstrates how Photoshop layers work together. It’s a great example.